The Best Books We've Read This Year (So Far)

From this year's reviews, our favorite picks

The Telling Room

The Telling Room

By Michael Paterniti

The subtitle of The Telling Room (The Dial Press, $27), by Michael Paterniti, is A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese. In the book, there is deep love, allegations of unthinkable betrayal, and a plot for murderous revenge — three pretty classic elements of a good story. Hamlet is about love, betrayal, and revenge. So is Fatal Attraction. So is Wedding Crashers. And for a while when you're reading this book, you wonder whether the cheese might be incidental — that the subtitle could just as easily have been A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Bat Mitzvah or the World's Greatest Plumbing-Supply Store — because you already have the essential elements. But the cheese is not incidental. For one thing, few writers can write about the taste of food with Paterniti's vibrancy and precision. Second, the cheese in question, produced deep in a rural Spanish cave by a huge, mysterious man who spoke in legends, was known far and wide and prized by kings and queens. And so when Paterniti stumbled on a story that had love, betrayal, revenge, and a miraculous cheese — while incidentally working on a 2001 Esquire profile of Spanish chef Ferran Adrià at the time — he knew he had a good one. It just didn't turn out to be the story he thought it was.

Angel Baby

Angel Baby

By Richard Lange

There are books — like Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men and Nic Pizzolatto's Galveston — that open with a trigger-snap of trouble and blast forward with the propulsive force of a bullet and never stop moving. Angel Baby (Mulholland Books, $26) is one of them. In a luxurious compound in Tijuana, Lux lives a pill-fogged life as the beautiful, dutiful wife of El Principe, a jefe in a drug cartel who sometimes seems more pit bull than man. When she breaks away — with a Colt .45 and a stack of money stolen from his safe — he sends an enforcer snarling after her. She seeks the daughter she left behind in L.A. and the help of a deadbeat she encounters along the way. This novel about an escape is the perfect summer escape. Lange proved his poetic grit with Dead Boys and This Wicked World, but Angel Baby puts him in a new category: crime boss.